Orchids

I’ve been delighting in the orchids that have bloomed most unexpectedly in my office on a years-old plant, suddenly full-sprung from nowhere, and wildly exotic, with that intense yellow at their so-foreign fingertips. 

They remind me of the spiders we found in Hawai’i at that place in coffee country that made such good macadamia nut pie, spindly and hung there in mid-air on webs we’d creepily walk into unawares—solid and impassable while yet invisible, like the glass window in the field in the Thurber fable. 

This poem tells it well—

The Orchid Flower

by Sam Hamill

Just as I wonder
whether it's going to die,
the orchid blossoms

and I can't explain why it
moves my heart, why such pleasure

comes from one small bud
on a long spindly stem, one
blood red gold flower

opening at mid-summer,
tiny, perfect in its hour.

Even to a white-
haired craggy poet, it's
purely erotic,

pistil and stamen, pollen,
dew of the world, a spoonful

of earth, and water.
Erotic because there's death
at the heart of birth,

drama in those old sunrise
prisms in wet cedar boughs,

deepest mystery
in washing evening dishes
or teasing my wife,

who grows, yes, more beautiful
because one of us will die.

I’d been thinking recently about old Nero Wolfe mysteries, too—the New York detective with his passion for orchids and gourmet cooking.

And here’s a new mystery, with orchids, that I must try to find:  A Twist of Orchids, by Michelle Wan.  (Set in the Dordogne, oddly, like another mystery I just bought.)

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Orchids1